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MEng team wins Fung Institute Mission Award

May 10, 2016

The Master of Engineering capstone team of Alison Burkland, Daniel Campo, Dragos Puscalau, and Gregory Wohlleb — working with bioengineering professor Kevin Healy — received the 2016 Fung Institute Mission Award for their work on a Point of Care Low-Cost Approach for HIV Monitoring.

This award is chosen by the staff at the Fung Institute, and is given to the MEng team that best exemplifies the mission of the institute: transforming scientists into leaders who can take risks and develop technical, social and economic innovations. For their project, the team developed a low cost, portable assay for HIV monitoring in low resource settings. The team addressed many of the formidable technical challenges of designing and building a prototype: microfluidics, fabrication and coating, cell capture, and image processing for cell counting. But, true to the mission of the Fung Institute, they also investigated the unique needs and infrastructure of the main target market—Sub-Saharan Africa—as well as studying the regulatory issues associated with getting the product to market.